Opinion: Technology, Eh? Can’t Live With It…

“To lose one parent, Mr Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.”

Oscar Wilde’s immortal line, put into the mouth of his character Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest, is what sprang to my mind when I checked my email inbox at the weekend and saw, for the second time in a couple of months, a flurry of ALLi blog posts stacked up, like planes queuing for take-off at an overcrowded airport.

I may be a busy bee, putting up a new post practically every day, but I didn’t remember being that busy. Then I twigged: the RSS feed had just unaccountably decided to store up a bunch of posts, before spitting them all out all in one go. AGAIN! Gah!

Like London buses, you wait for ages, then two (or more) come at once

The first time this happened, during the festive season, it probably felt like less of an irritant, because a lot of us will have been steadfastly ignoring our inboxes during the holidays. To pull the same trick in February, when we’re all back into sensible working habits, knuckling down for the long haul till the next big holidays, and when the season of goodwill is definitely over, is rather more annoying.

It was also particularly irritating because our technical team had just spent more hours than ever before (no, make that days, or even weeks) overhauling and upgrading our website’s back end, to make it more robust as it continues to grow like Topsy.

The above photo, translated for my American friends

I confess I’ve never entirely understood how RSS feeds work, and to be honest I couldn’t tell you what RSS stands for, but then I don’t usually need to. (This is why I’m only the blog editor.) It’s like the names of those wiggly bits of metal in your car engine that you don’t need to know about until they go wrong or drop off – then suddenly you have to become an instant expert.

Maybe it was a crack in the flange sprocket dangle hinge that did it…

I hoped our many subscribers would take the attitude shown by some of the members on our private Facebook forum when the glitch manifested itself.

“Ooh, I’ve hit the jackpot!” said one subscriber

I took heart from the fact that most us, so used to the vagaries of IT, have now hard-wired our brains to tolerate them. Whenever I read a sentence whose meaning has been subverted by autocorrect, I automatically convert it into meaningful human language – a kind of Google Translate in reverse.

“I just thought it meant you really liked me,” said another

I hoped subscribers might also be reminded of other IT hiccups that they’ve encountered over the years and think “Phew, I’m glad it’s not only me that does things like that!” like when you accidentally hit the “send” button too soon on the very early draft of an email, or send your boss a paper with “track changes” inadvertently left on, showing just how indecisive you really are. I hoped they might be amused, as I was, thinking of other such incidents in their past.

#BeamMeUpScotty

To be fair to the high tech world, I have to say my own personal favourite was caused not by machine but by man – or rather woman. Years ago I headed a small team which included a particularly obstreperous individual who spent most of the time sulking and messaging her friends. One quiet afternoon, there landed in my inbox a heartfelt email that she meant to send to her long-suffering husband. According to her message, I had apparently spent the morning being “difficult”, while the male colleague who shared our office was declared to be an “a***”. (Translation for my American friends: that would be an “a**”.) Curiously, that incident made me feel more sympathetic to her than before. I hope my forgiveness made her realise that I was not quite as difficult as she’d painted me.

So I’m hoping our RSS blockages are over now (if it were down to me, I’d be feeding it a high-fibre breakfast every day), and that you, dear subscribers, will forgive us. With our 1,000th post due to hit the ether soon, I hope you’ll think this blog is too valuable a resource to turn your back on. Or if you don’t yet subscribe, on the basis that the safest time to fly is after a crash, you might even want to hit the subscriber button now.

OVER TO YOU

Now on a brighter note, what’s the most embarrassing technology-related problem that you’ve ever come across? Make me feel better by sharing yours via the comments box!

About Debbie Young

Debbie Young writes warm, funny feel-good fiction inspired by her home in a picturesque English Cotswold village. The first in the Sophie Sayers Village Mysteries, "Best Murder in Show" was published in April 2017, and the second, "Trick or Murder", will follow in August 2017. She has also published three themed collections of short stories: "Marry in Haste", "Stocking Fillers" and "Quick Change".
She blogs about her writing life on her author website www.authordebbieyoung.com, which includes more information about her role as founder and director of the Hawkesbury Upton Literature Festival. She is also Publications Manager for the Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi).

14 Responses to Opinion: Technology, Eh? Can’t Live With It…

My most embarrassing technology moment came when I quit my last salaried job. I was the victim of departmental politics that had to do with the guy who hired me, rather than me, but ended up with a lot of knives in my back at precisely the moment the recession hit hard and a substantial percentage of that workforce were culled. (For context, let me explain that this was Illinois, an “at will” state where you can lose or quit your job at a minute’s notice.)

An abrupt departure would save someone else’s job, so I departed abruptly. As most of my colleagues were also Facebook friends, I sent a group message, blaming no-one but just announcing my departure.

A friend in another department, not realizing it was a group message, expressed her feelings about her boss, who was also on the group message. I replied, also not realizing the gaffe.

My friend was out of her job the next day, and I still feel bad when she blogs about having to short sale her house some months later, even though she’s never blamed me. I got the chance to explain my own remark to a colleague who’d misinterpreted it, but I’m sure the rest of the group similarly interpreted something I said about my own failings to mean THEM.

I’m glad you wrote this and glad to learn that this is not a normal occurrence. I just signed up for ALLi e-mails within the past week. When I saw the flurry of e-mails I wondered if this was normal or if the system was sending me recent ones so I could catch up.
And as a retired IT professional, I understand that things happen

Haha! It’s predictive text that drives me mad and I rarely notice until it’s too late. I realised at the weekend that the deluge of ALLI items was likely to be similar glitch as Christmas. Just thought ALLI was spoiling us 🙂

Oh, and please accept my best wishes for a speedy recovery from your flange sprocket affliction. Sounds most unpleasant.

I’ve had a myriad of embarrassing moments – working in IT for over three decades will do that for you. Perhaps the most embarrassing was when I messed up the RSS feed for… oh… too soon, perhaps?

OK then – many years ago I took delivery of one of the very first Dell computers. Spiffy, with a (I think) 5 GByte hard disk, which in those days was enormous. Who could ever need more that that!
I was the only programmer at the time working on a major rewrite of our software, which was already used by a quarter of the local councils in the UK, and we were two weeks away from delivering a new release.

I proudly copied all the old code across to the new machine. And wiped the old machine.
Then the hard disk in my brand new shiny Dell died.
Called them up. Sorry, send it back and we’ll put a new one in. And all the data on the old one…?